I may be the last person to know about this, but Eric Idle has written an oratorio.

(I just heard an excerpt on NPR Shuffle, which had me giggling for 10 minutes or so. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a UK tour, or at the very least a CD....)

More bad news. Dammit.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010413.html

Some while ago, when I first started getting interested in the history of London, I came across George Vertue's map of the Civil War defences of London. (Teeny image here.) I live right next to the site of one of the forts, so this map caught my attention.

I've walked around the Roman walls fairly often; it's a pleasant stroll, and there are remnants of the wall to be seen. The Civil War defences are a more substantial walking proposition: from Wapping in the east to Buckingham Palace in the west, from the New River Head in the north to the Imperial War Museum in the south. Not only that, but there's nothing left to see: the defences were torn down almost immediately after the war, and Vertue drew his map nearly a century later.

There are primary sources, of course: Acts of Parliament, for a start, and apparently William Lithgow wrote a contemporary account (although he seems to have been nicknamed "Lying Lithgow", which is hardly encouraging). But who needs primary sources? There are no remains above ground, and I'm not about to start digging, so what difference does it make if I'm a hundred yards out?

At least, that's what I thought. I walked along the defences (ish) last weekend, took photos, and may even upload them eventually -- but now I'm starting to consider buying books about Civil War London. Just to, you know, make sure I was in the right place. This is presumably how OCD starts...

Thou Shalt Not...

...record a demo tape if you make Florence Foster Jenkins sound like Karen Carpenter (O Nightingale).

...record Maxwell's Silver Hammer under any circumstances, but particularly not if Jessica Mitford is singing it.

...release Christian propaganda in the form of earworms with ridiculous titles (Harry the Hamster sings the 10 Commandments: The Sabbath Song, which I've been humming for the last three days, dammit).

...play anything by Bach using only non-melodic instruments (Bach for Percussion).

(Via aprilwinchell.com, Music for Maniacs and Beware of the Blog.) The Bach percussion appears to be entirely Serious and Artistic, but personally I'd never have guessed it was Bach. Those who know their Bach better than I do (teaparty.net, are you there?), what do you reckon?

Some while ago, in a comment, I mentioned to juggzy that I'd written a program that used M*cr*s*ft Live Earth to generate random walks on a real map. It's great for photography practice: "go for this walk, and take five photos as near as you can to each of the stops". In a moment of unwarranted enthusiasm, I even promised to supply the code, but then I looked at the code, and, er, well.

Anyway, I rediscovered the application over Christmas. After I'd thrown it away and started again from scratch, I had a web page that could generate random walks, beer-glass walks and even themed walks (of which pub-crawls would be the canonical example, but you could do church-crawls or even Dixons-crawls if you really wanted to).

The user interface is appalling, and I make no claims for the code, other than "if you think that's bad, you should have seen version one", but it seems to more or less work. Try it out for yourself. Oh, and if it auto-generates you a suicidal walk: say "down the M4, across a minefield and then over a cliff", I disclaim all responsibility.

Once again, I'm missing all the fun. I love London in the snow, but I'm currently in Edinburgh (where it is bastard cold, but not a single flake so far). Bah! Feh! Grumble!

I'm loving Edinburgh, though. Haven't been here since I was ten, so it's all new to me. And all the pubs are smoke-free, and it seems like most of them have free wireless access. What's not to like?

...an imponderable question from this week's London by London. I almost don't dare to read the text; it can't live up to the title.

I missed the weather! I was Up North all week, and never saw a single flake of snow. Bah. On the other hand, I have now seen Ayr (in the dark), Glasgow (in the dark) and Newcastle (in the dark). And I have blithered about SharePoint to literally dozens of people, most of them working for the NHS. For a treat, I'm now going to Stop Bloody Talking for the next few days....

The world is divided into Mozart fans and Wagner fans, and I am definitely a Mozart fan. Even so, I dithered for quite a while in HMV before I had an attack of box-set-ism and bought the complete Mozart. Only fifty quid in the sales, and it's one hundred and seventy CDs. That's a thirty-centimetre stack, weighing 3.4 kilos (and that's in paper envelopes; if they were in jewel cases, you'd have to build an extension to your house).

I'm all partied out (thanks, smallbeasts, for the New Year party, and purpletigron and purplecthulhu for the open house), and I now have the perfect reason to hibernate. 10 down, 160 to go...

The last train to North Woolwich is tomorrow night. And good riddance to it, though I'll miss the romantic middle-of-nowhere feeling of North Woolwich station itself...